Base Details
Uploaded by lakejm on May 21, 2002
The poem ‘Base Details’ by Siegfried Sassoon is a sarcastic attack against the army generals who view the war as a game similar to checkers. It is therefore evidence of why Siegfried Sassoon is known as the “voice of protest”. The first noticeable thing about the text is the title. The word base is a pun for the fact that base means headquarters as well as dishonourable or cowardly, which implies that he will talk about the dishonourable activities at the Army headquarters.
Secondly, Sassoon appeared to have blamed the officers for the purposeless deaths of his fellow men, while they were behind the front line and had no idea what it was like.
Sassoon uses many adjectives to describe his generalisation of those at the top “fat and bald and short of breath” which shows the hatred that he has.
In this poem, Sassoon writes “poor young chap…I used to know his father well.” This statement alone is typical of an army general. To show the fact that army generals can not comprehend what war is like he uses the phrase “we lost heavily in this last scrap”. The army generals are calling this a scrap like it’s a fight between boys at school. Sassoon calls the army generals “Finally, Sassoon rounds the poem of with a phrase by reinforcing that they are unfit and fat. He also shows that those at the front line could die any moment by saying “When the war is done and youth stone dead, Id toddle safely home and die, in bed” which is a good ending because it says that the generals will die in a nice warm peaceful place, while the soldiers will die among the rats.